Reality Handbook (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} realityhandbook) wrote,@ 2008-04-23 18:03:00 |
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| Entry tags: | letter |
Open Letter: To Six Hours a Week Blog
I came across an interesting blog by someone who believes herself to be under pervasive government surveillance, to the point where they're hiring people to get to know more about her and pretending to be her friend and that her hairdresser is a government spy. Given all the wacky things I give some level of credibility to, I don't think that's impossible...just unlikely.
But I have a strong interest in accountability, investigation, and making "secret knowledge" open. And my heart goes out to anyone who is having challenging thoughts and receiving nothing but isolation-inducing responses and lack of communication. So I find things like the letters she gets back from the NSA in response to her queries quite typical of what a world of false authority we live in. It's unfortunate that the only people who get so riled up about it are those who are disoriented and looking for answers, who get marginalized because of their disorientation.
Though I left a comment on the NSA letter entry, another later comment has been approved while mine was not. I don't want it lost, though there's sort of a psychologically predictive element that she might reject its content because it questions the validity of her interpretation of her experience. But as is my usual pattern when I don't get response from a letter, I'll just open it up and publish—as the theme of the post is transparency in any case. Here's what I had to say:
Dear Kyeann,
Well...I don't think it's a good idea to be 100% sure that you are actually being followed or systematically spied on by the US government!! Though it's *theoretically* possible that new friends you meet are covert agents, there are much more mundane explanations for—say—why your hairdresser mentioned a detail of your life that don't remember telling her. Even if you were to find out she goes through your garbage, it doesn't mean she works for the U.S. government. She might just be a stalker. :)
But this letter you got back from the NSA is a good thing for everyone to take a long, serious look at. Regardless of whether your surveillance is real or imagined, you're unearthing very real "black holes" in government accountability. Those should not be quietly accepted just because people are too busy with other issues to worry about it.
Something else is really wrong here and it's entirely tangential to surveillance. What I'm most mad about parallels the quote in your entry about Martin Luther King about how we must shift from being a society focused on "things" and start to focus on "people". I ask this: would a people-focused government allow the NSA to write back an obviously distressed girl with a nonsense Catch-22 form letter that's only going to make her more distressed??!
The kind of bureaucrats who lean on things like that letter to address a voice reaching out to them are basically what I have come to term "spam humans". Like a message in your inbox with a seemingly meaningful headline that turns out to be for pills, the person who sent you that letter may look like a real person but they might be inauthentic. I don't recognize the "humanity" of something just because it stands upright and blinks. Ever see "They Live"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live
The folks who sent you that letter are the sort who'll smugly smile and laugh if you ended up being arrested in a protest outside a government building, and were then diagnosed by a court psychiatrist as paranoid schizophrenic (thus incompetent to stand trial, so they can keep you locked up indefinitely under the guise that you are in a "hospital"). Then they'd go out and buy dinner with money they made from investing in the pharmaceutical companies that interlock with this whole system.
For these and many reasons, I do not recognize the U.S. government as legitimate. Guess it's kind of a religious issue at this point, because I don't give any Man-made organization authority. Truth is the only real power we should pledge our service to, and I do strongly identify with V's speech from V for Vendetta:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8TLD3Z6sJWA
Until the revolution comes--be it Man's revolution or God's--take care of yourself! Don't let the distracting ideas work you into a frenzy. For instance, it's probably not true that you are being singled out for following by the government. Though if you didn't have a file at the NSA you now almost certainly do, even if it's just containing your letter...(quite interesting how some of these things become self-fulfilling prophecies!)
What is most certainly true is that there is terrible corruption and a very insidious mentality in most of the population. By extension this applies to the type of people they choose to put in power. But try not to panic! And it's good to remember what Jonathan Livingston Seagull said:
"Do you want to fly so much that you will forgive the Flock, and learn, and go back to them one day and work to help them know?"
Keeping one's sense of humor about it all helps too:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/i
:)
Kind regards,
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